JENNIFER LABRECQUE - Northern Exposure

“Dalton?” she echoed, her voice sounding weak even to her own ears. “Neighbor?” This situation was going from bad to worse. “What about other people in the area?” she asked, a sick feeling, dread rather than nausea, gathering in the pit of her empty stomach.

“There’s nobody else, dear. You’ll have all the privacy you want. Out at Shadow Lake, you can get away from the hustle and bustle of Good Riddance.”

How much hustle and bustle could there be in a town that didn’t appear to even have a traffic light? She stifled rising hysteria. It was bad enough to be sent to this God-forsaken town, but now she was about to be stuck in a dead woman’s cabin on the edge of some lake, solely dependent on an ex-convict. Somebody just take a gun and shoot her. Wait, in this area, someone might be all too willing. “It sounds lovely,” she said, her voice faint.

“You can really indulge your inner pioneer spirit,” Merrilee said with a wide smile.

“My inner pioneer spirit?” Skye repeated and mustered a weak smile. She didn’t possess a single ounce of pioneer spirit. Nope. None. “Um …there is running water, isn’t there?”

“No worries, Doc,” Saunders said with what might appear to be a friendly smile to the rest of the room but which she knew to be an evil smirk. “It’s not that far to carry the bucket to the lake. And I’ll show you how to rub the flint together to start a fire. Just think of all that Girl Scout training you can put to use.”

“A bucket to the lake? Flint?” She surreptitiously pinched herself just to make sure she hadn’t fallen into a nightmare even worse than the recurring one she often had, where she showed up at a medical conference naked.

“Hush, Dalton.” Merrilee waved a hand at the bush pilot. “You’re scaring her to death. Don’t pay him any attention, honey. He’s just joshing you. Irene put in running water at the same time Dalton did. And the electricity might be iffy sometimes, but we all use matches instead of flint. I’ll send you out with a pack just in case.”

Skye said nothing because she wasn’t so sure she could muster anything outside of a wail.

But it didn’t really matter because Ms. Merrilee Danville Weatherspoon filled what was almost a conversational gap.

“Are you hungry, honey?”

As if on cue, Skye’s empty stomach growled. “I could eat.”

“Dalton, I’m taking Dr. Skye—you don’t mind if I call you that, do you, honey? With those lovely eyes you look like a Dr. Skye instead of a stuffy Dr. Shanahan—” How could she tell this transplanted steel magnolia no? “—over to Gus’s for a bite of dinner before y’all head out. That was the plan before the roof caved in upstairs anyway. Can you give us about an hour?”

“No problem, Merrilee. It’ll take at least that long to move all of her luggage from the plane to the truck.”

Merrilee swatted at Saunders. Too bad she missed—someone needed to smack the smug look right off his ruggedly handsome face. Did everyone in Good Riddance know about his record? Probably no one cared. That’s what these outposts of civilization were like, populated by misfits and miscreants.

She realized suddenly that she was starving, having lost her lunch earlier. Dinner at Gus’s would probably prove to be worse than a fast-food drive-thru but it would be food. And food would be good right now.

She could only pray that Saunders drove a truck better than he piloted a plane. And she absolutely refused to think about the fact that she was going to spend the next week living close to a man she found altogether too attractive for her own good.

DALTON HEAVED THE LAST of the suitcases into the bed of the pickup truck and headed toward Gus’s. Bull Swenson fell into step beside him. “You brought the new Doc in today, eh? She’s a looker. I saw her from upstairs.”

Dalton was altogether too aware of just what a looker the new doc was.

“She’s an acid-tongued shrew.” He knew whatever he said to Bull would stay with Bull, except for bits and pieces that might trickle through to Merrilee. Merrilee had a way of pulling information out of people and since she and Bull had been an item longer than Dalton had been around, chances were Merrilee would soon know how he felt about the good doctor. But Dalton didn’t care.

Shanahan was what she was—an acid-tongued shrew in a tempting package of red hair, blue eyes and a nicely rounded figure. However, he knew only a crazy man would wade into the frigid waters of Shanahan Bay, although he’d been sorely tempted to do just that earlier today. There’d be something seriously wrong with a man who actually sought out her company.

Bull rumbled, which was his version of a chuckle. “She reminds me of Merrilee when I first met her, fresh out of the lower forty-eight and full of piss and vinegar.”

“Merrilee full of piss and vinegar?” Merrilee was strong. Any woman who elected to live in the Alaskan bush had to be made of stern stuff. “She’s determined and she’s got an iron backbone but …”

“Yep. I’d say that sums up Dr. Skye.”

Dalton preferred to think of her as Shanahan but then again he could only imagine that the Dr. Skye tag would annoy her almost as much as being called Doc. Still, Dalton hadn’t been referring to her.

“No. I meant Merrilee has an iron backbone.”

“That she does. But Dr. Skye does, too.”

“How would you know that about the Doc already?”

Bull slanted him a look from beneath his bushy grey eyebrows. “At my age, there aren’t many things that can surprise me when it comes to people.”

The Doc wasn’t as tough as Bull thought. Alaska was going to chew Skye Shanahan up and spit her out. “She tossed it on the trip in. I had to land at Bear Claw point to let her clean up.”

Bull laughed, but it wasn’t an unkind laugh at Doc’s expense. Actually, Dalton got the distinct impression the joke was on him. Bull clapped a meaty hand across Dalton’s back. After eight years Dalton was prepared—the first time it had sent him flying. “Son, a backbone of steel doesn’t necessarily extend to the belly. Did I ever tell you about the time I signed on for a fishing season with Cap’n Louis Montrique?”

Dalton shook his head. Bull got a faraway look in his eye. “It was in ‘72 and I’d come up from Laredo, Texas. Alaska was something then. A man could find breathing room. I’d heard you could make good money in a short period of time working one of the fishing boats. I lost thirty pounds—puked every pound off. I’ve never been so sick in my life, but I’d been hired to do a job so I learned fast to haul in a net while feeding the fishes. They don’t hire extra hands so there’s no one to pick up any slack. Every man’s got to carry his own load. But my point is, I’m as tough as they come, but motion sickness, it doesn’t take any prisoners. Don’t go judging Doc Skye too harshly.”

Bull was one of the toughest men Dalton knew. It wasn’t something Bull discussed, but it was common knowledge to everyone in Good Riddance that the man had spent two years at the Hanoi Hilton, courtesy of the Vietcong, back during the Vietnam War. It didn’t take much to figure those memories were one of things Bull wanted to bid Good Riddance to when he settled here. The Doc had obviously won Bull over at “hello” which was saying something. Bull was known for being an excellent judge of character.

“Okay,” Dalton said. “We’ll see.”

They climbed the two wooden stairs lit by a blinking neon sign declaring the locale to be Augustina’s—commonly known near and far as Gus’s.

Gus hailed them the moment they walked in the door. “Evening, gentlemen. They’re waiting for you over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the right. “The crowd just died down. Y’all want the regular?”